Jerry, it's the realpolitik happening now. The people currently holding the balance of power in America are not as willing to overlook or cover up the shoddy corrupt biased nonsense the IPCC has been putting out despite its lip service to impartial assessment of scientific outputs as the previous incumbents were.

I'm not a conservative myself but I'm right behind them on this.

Even if you can't bring yourself to read something written by a conservative, read the last attachment, the email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann, and think about the implications. In fact, I'm going to reproduce it here, since it's in the public domain anyway:

Jerry, I'm 100% behind the idea of removing subsidy from all producers of energy related products and removing the tax on the products too.

I'm sure you'll agree with me that the subsidy paid to corn growers for growing corn to be used for fuel-ethanol production has skewed the market and led to a lot of hunger and deprivation in the third world after all.

Then of course there is wind power. Heavily subsidized, not only directly by the taxpayer, but also by the fossil fuel generators who have to keep their power stations ticking over regardless of whether the windmills are working or not, see cartoon on the last page.

And naturally we wouldn't want subsidy paid to solar producers either, to be fair, which I'm sure you want to be?

However, none of all that has any bearing on what the IPCC has been up to. Saying that they have considered and properly assessed all the best peer reviewed climate science when they have actually been blocking publication of papers which don't fit their agenda, and quoting from grey literature written by advocacy groups which stand to benefit financially from the promotion of their agenda. Including the boss of the outfit Rajenda Pachauri, who was until recently a director of a company which obtained very large sums of money to investigate the Himalayan glaciers which the IPCC report erroneously said were going to melt by 2035.

Subsidies on corn are not good - inefficient way to produce alcohol, results in cheap sweetener that food manufacturers put in food to make it more addictive causing obesity,... it's a subsidy to big companies like ADM more than family farmers - maybe some good will come out of all this right wing spending reduction craziness

Coal and oil have external costs - air polution, mine polution, military costs to protect supply. You should either tax to account for that or subsidize wind and solar if they don't have such external costs.

And it makes sense for the government to help pay for new technology. Historically, government has paid for all sorts of high tech development like computers or medical or electrical power generation or nuclear or ... these likely wouldn't exist if it hadn't been "primed" by the government.

Same thing applies to alternate energy or efficiency. After they become developed they should be able to stand on their own

I don't know about IPCC. They seem very political. They are trying to prove that the increased CO2 has changed the climate which is difficult at this time. And they're stuck between the developing countries that want to increase CO2 to develop and the developed countries that don't want to commit to CO2 emmision reduction unless everyone has to. Maybe something good will come from this eventually.

the survey is here http://people-press.org/2011/05/04/section-8-domestic-issues-and-social-policy/

from the story I listened to...

The American public is less likely to believe in global warming than it was just five years ago. Yet, paradoxically, scientists are more confident than ever that climate change is real and caused largely by human activities.

Something a bit strange is happening with public opinion and climate change.

Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale University Project on Climate Change Communication, delved into this in a recent poll. He not only asked citizens what they thought of climate change, he also asked them to estimate how climate scientists feel about global warming.

"Only 13 percent of Americans got the correct answer, which is that in fact about 97 percent of American scientists say that climate change is happening, and about a third of Americans just simply say they don't know," he said.

...

Of course, it's still possible to find a few scientists who reject the consensus. Cicerone says it is appealing to think they are right when they say there's no need to worry about complicated cap-and-trade policies or otherwise fuss about climate change.

"I think rooting for the underdog, the David against the Goliath, is something that we all do — I think it's particularly American, although it happens everywhere," he said. "And in fact, this is the way scientists work.

"Scientists don't gain respect, and attention, and fame, if you will, by going along with the mainstream, and I don't know of many scientists who try to go along with the mainstream — they're trying to go the opposite direction."

===

Interesting how non-scientists would believe scientists if the non-scientists only understood there was a concensus among scientists : ) We are either dumb or lucky or maybe both

"Scientists don't gain respect, and attention, and fame, if you will, by going along with the mainstream, and I don't know of many scientists who try to go along with the mainstream — they're trying to go the opposite direction."

scientists get Nobel prizes for some new theory that is inconsistent with the mainstream if they can get the mainstream to switch over to their new theory

The people of the U.S.A. have enjoyed a rising standard of consumption for at least a century.

To then hear scientists turn around and state that the very foundation upon which this rising standard has been largely based -cheap, abundant fossil fuels- is potentially leading to its collapse...

Why would anyone want to believe that? We've had generation after generation of people that expect a rising standard of consumption. The entire economy is based on a perpetually rising standard of consumption. Whereas a real, rising wage once financed this increasing consumption, now we finance it through credit. But make no mistake, everyone still expects more. It's deeply engrained in our psyche that we must outdo our parents in earnings and consumption; this is a large part of what the American Dream is founded upon and it's worked for millions so far.

But to then turn around and tell people that their expectations are completely unsustainable (environmentally and economically), that the old model is broken...

Scientific consensus aside, it makes perfect sense to me that nobody would want to believe this.

For a creature that is so amazingly adaptive, it's equally amazing that we so intensely fear change.

Jerry says:Industry spends money on propoganda to get people to doubt global warming

Not anything like as much as some governments spend on propaganda to get people to believe humans caused it. An estimated $80 billion so far in the last 25 years.

Craig says:For a creature that is so amazingly adaptive, it's equally amazing that we so intensely fear change.

So much so, that some make up fairy stories about how it didn't change in the past and so we must be the agent making it change now.

We are lucky to have led our lives at a time of a beneficiently active Sun. That could change soon. Within a decade. the recent announcement of a possible prolonged solar minimum should be a wake up call. The AGW propaganda machine is perhaps too full of it's own hype to get the message. The people seem more realistic. The recent hard winters since the Sun went quiet are indicative of how wrong the AGW proponents are about the relative strengths of co2 and the Sun as climate forcing agents.

Real human fear is for lack of food and warmth. For very good reasons. Warm times like the medieval warm period and the Roman warm period were times of plenty, and rich cultural development. Cold times like the dark ages and the little ice age were times of famine, war, plague and death. No sunspots were seen for 50 years during the coldest part of the LIA. We just had a minimum between solar cycles 23 and 24 with longer spotless periods than seen since the early 1800's. Cycle 24 is the lowest since cycle 5 in 1805-1815. We ignore history at our peril.

We need to be ready to adapt to change in global and particularly local climates, whichever way it changes.

Jerry, insolation at 65N took a dive a thousand years ago, the next ice age may never begin at all, or it may already have begun two winters ago.

The rhetoric is hot again down under:

Jill Singer in the Herald Sun:

" Prime Minister Julia Gillard, as has been widely noted, misled our nation by declaring she wouldn’t introduce such a [carbon dioxide] tax. The worst that can be said is that she lied. The best that can be said is that she lied because we can’t deal with the truth.... I’m prepared to keep an open mind and propose another stunt for climate sceptics – put your strong views to the test by exposing yourselves to high concentrations of either carbon dioxide or some other colourless, odourless gas – say, carbon monoxide.

You wouldn’t see or smell anything. Nor would your anti-science nonsense be heard of again. How very refreshing."

What is it with these AGW zombies and their obsession with gassing, tattoos, holocausts and death trains?

Arapiles has signed out. Anyone else up for defending the indefensible?

I cut and pasted some notes but lost the reference. I was wondering about science debates and concensus and just what are we talking about? Why is it so confusing in modern times? And, if the concensus is correct about human impact - is the true debate about how much and how fast?

== notes ==So one must turn to the scientific literature tobe certain of what scientists really think.

Before the twentieth century, this would have been a trivialtask. The number of scientists directly involved in any givendebate was usually small. A handful, a dozen, perhaps a hundred,at most, participated—in part because the total numberof scientists in the world was very small (Price 1986).

Moreover, because professional science was a limited activity, manyscientists used language that was accessible to scientists inother disciplines as well as to serious amateurs. It was relativelyeasy for an educated person in the nineteenth or earlytwentieth century to read a scientific book or paper and understandwhat the scientist was trying to say. One did not have tobe a scientist to read The Principles of Geology or The Originof Species.

Our contemporary world is different. Today, hundreds ofthousands of scientists publish over a million scientific paperseach year. The American Geophysical Union has 41,000members in 130 countries, and the American MeteorologicalSociety has 11,000. The IPCC reports involved the participationof many hundreds of scientists from scores of countries(Houghton, Jenkins, and Ephraums 1990; Alley et al. 2007).No individual could possibly read all the scientific papers on asubject without making a full-time career of it.

A good analogy is evolution. In the early twentieth century, paleontologistGeorge Gaylord Simpson introduced the concept of ‘‘tempoand mode’’ to describe questions about the manner of evolution—how fast and in what manner evolution proceeded. Biologistsby the mid-twentieth century agreed about the reality ofevolution, but there were extensive debates about its tempoand mode. So it is now with climate change. Virtually all professionalclimate scientists agree on the reality of human inducedclimate change, but debate continues on tempo andmode.

Are they trying to blame the minority trying to prove AGW is false because the masses either do not understand or are not convinced by the concensus?

I guess the other difficulty that we've discussed before is that the science is based on a model and that presents problems when forecasting the future. So they test the model using the past, but that requires tweaks.

Yesterday I heard about China building superhighways in Kenya. Don't think the world will change to avoid the impending melt down.

Now what would be ironic is if the AGW actually saved us from the coming freeze : )

George: spot on my friend, the real question is not about if, but how much. I'm surprised only 97% of the Earth scientists questioned in the botched survey agreed that climate change was happening. The climate is always changing, everyone (except 3% of earth scientists apparently) knows that. Most people also accept that human co2 emissions and other activities make *some* difference. The question is, how much?

Nobody knows. What we do know though is that the IPCC estimates are overblown on several counts. Our current estimate is that the effect of extra co2 is somewhere between zero and around 1.2C for a doubling of concentration. We already saw 0.7C from 'pre-industrial' levels, and the effect of co2 is logarithmic, so maybe another 0.25C to come if we hit 450parts per million co2 by 2050. If natural factors don't take things the other way. I think they will, and that's why I put $1000 of my money where my mouth is with Dean.

Jerry says:

But the timescale for global cooling is 10,000 years but 100 years for warming due to CO2 (or whatever)

By the time the cooling will happen, all the CO2 will be reabsorbed and then not available

But but, I thought the residence time of the dreaded carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was hundreds of years? (It's really about 7)

10,000 years for cooling the whole of the high latitudes down to ice age levels yes. But locally, no. Greenland ice cores show drops of 5C in a matter of a few decades happen regularly. That's what pushed the Vikings out of Greenland in the C14th.

Canada could become unfarmable pretty quickly if the Sun stayed asleep for a few decades.

Seems like we should understand it better before blindly releasing all this CO2 into the atmosphere

Seems like we should understand it better before we tax our economies into oblivion too. Given that the world hasn't got any warmer in the last 12 years while atmospheric co2 has increased ~15% Maybe we should take a little longer to re-check things before we accept the word of an organisation, the IPCC, which has lied about the Himalayan glaciers, lied about their lies, lied about the status of the grey literature they have promoted as peer reviewed science, lied about the peer review system and the journals and lied about the financial interests of their chief and a number of their lead authors.

Too many lies for the consequences for society they advocate. We need engineering quality estimates and rigorous standards and assessment procedures. We need computer scientists and software architects crawling all over the model code. We need properly qualified statisticians checking Michael Mann's latest sea level paper. We need the properly enforced conflict of interest policy in place now, not after the next IPCC report comes out.

Just because someone is making a thinly veiled suggestion that you be euthanized with Carbon Monoxide doesn't mean we shouldn't take prudent actions to reduce CO2 emmisions.

Thanks Jerry, that made me laugh out loud.

I might make a bit more of a fuss about it when the Greenshirts try to haul me off to their gas chambers though.